Inventor and Alias: how is this relevant?
Did anyone catch Ricky Jordan’s recent post on Cosmic Blobs Pro? Cosmic Blobs is old news, and actually so is CB Pro, having been around for three years or more. Instead of thinking about Cosmic Blobs as a kids toy, which it actually is, why not think of it as a conceptual shape modeler? Not Alias, but maybe Maya-like (more like mesh modeler for game or animation characters). It’s not that much of a stretch. Not that there is any valid functional comparison between CB Pro and Maya or anything, even 3dsmax, but just comparing the ideas of shape concept modelers. SolidWorks seems to be actively doing something with the CB Pro line, it has a very active website and one guy who is simply fanatical.
Anyway, I would not be surprised to see something announced at SolidWorks World centered around shape concept modeling, and there are several directions in which this can go. Is SolidWorks going to continue in the CAD vein and create a new NURBS modeler somewhere between Rhino and Sketchup to compete with Alias? Or are they going to slip into that vague morass called “3D digital content creation” and make a mesh modeler to compete with the myriad other mesh modelers out there, but from a product development standpoint?
And beyond that? Who knows? SW won’t take this Alias-Inventor thing lying down, I’m sure of that. Even if they aren’t very concerned with fixing my curve-feature-absorbed-in-a-sweep-feature bugs, they know exactly what Adesk is doing, and they’re up to something.